How to Create Personas for Marketing Integration Personalization

A persona is a very effective way to segment your database. Personas are used to make sure your messages are as relevant as they can possibly be. Personas can be interest based as well as demographic based. There are two types of personas:

Interest-based persona: This type of persona is based on actions people take, not just who they are. These may include the following actions:

Page views (Number of or specific)

Length of time on site

Frequency of visits

White paper download

Lead score

Demographic-based persona: A demographic persona is based on information about a person. This data usually lives in your CRM. Examples of these data points are

Job title

Company size

Location

Region

Existing client

How to create demographic personas

Demographic-based personas help you create automated campaigns relevant to a data point such as a job title. To create your demographic-based personas, look at past deals that have closed and ask sales to help you determine how many people are part of the decision-making process on average.

Do your best to determine common characteristics between people such as job title, company size, and so on. Try to do your best to keep this list to only three roles in the buying cycle.

Decision maker: This is the person who has the final say. Usually this person signs contracts and is involved with only a very small part of the buyer’s journey and sales cycle. The decision maker is easy to identify by job title when you’re creating a behavioral segmentation.

You can also identify this person by specific content engagements, such as which white paper she read or which blog post she found helpful. This assumes, of course, that you have content tailored to such a person.

Information gatherer: This is usually a lower-level person on the team. This person is tasked with getting all the information for the team to then review and decide. The information gatherer is usually a main point of contact, but he can’t make any decisions.

Champion: The champion can hold any job title in the organization. This person is a fan of your technology, company, or employees. This is your inside person who is fighting for you.

Identifying champions is very hard by job title because they can be anyone. They are much easier to identify by their level of activity and engagement within the company. Your true champions are likely to be very active on social media and to frequent your blog.

After creating your demographic personas, create your segmentation rules to build your lists by persona. You should start with a list for each persona. For example, if you have three personas, you have three lists. This should leave you with three specific lists.

How to create interest-based personas

To create interest-based personas, you need to use a combination of segmentation and lead-scoring methodology.

Use segmentation to track where someone is in his or her buyer’s journey and then use a score to measure the level of interest. Interest-based personas should be broken down into three levels (the following score ranges are based on a 100-point scoring model):